| Failure is part of life and learning from it is the key and what I've tried to impart on our players is we're going to lose some games, but play to the best of your ability every day. Sometimes there's going to be a better team on the other side, but let's look in the mirror, and if you can say I did everything I could tonight to perform well. I was mentally prepared for the ball game. I was physically prepared. I reacted once the game began and I got beat by a better team. Go home and get a good nights rest and let's go get them tomorrow.
Now if we did something wrong, where we fundamentally broke down and missed a sign, we maybe have to get back in the classroom. We may need a little more practice, because when it comes time to play the game, we have to be at our best and react and not do too much thinking. Sometimes we get in trouble thinking too much.
I don't know how I survived before I accepted the Lord as my savior. Only recently have I gotten to the point where I realize what it means to surrender all. I still struggle. I still want to hold a little bit back, and there are so many scriptures in the Bible that keep me going. Anything to do with Joshua, because Joshua was a guy thrown in a leadership role. What I cling to a lot is in Deuteronomy 31:8, where you know he's always there even when that stress is there, when the team is going bad, when the pressure is on, when the family is struggling, just remember you're never alone.
I don't know of anything I could say that would change anyone out there. It's going to have to be a personal experience, because so many times my wife, my children, my friends, they told me your family is emotionally dying, you've emotionally separated yourself from your family.
I couldn't see it until one day my wife became very ill, and unfortunately it had to reach the point of her becoming very sick. It took that for Lord, who had been trying to get a hold of me, to finally get me to come around to what he was trying to teach me.
I go back to a practice I learned from Christian author Patrick Morley. He has an exercise in his book "Man in the Mirror," and it spoke volumes to me. He suggests that you make a list of the 10 people you spend the most time with on one side of a sheet of paper. On the other side, make a list of the 10 people who will shed the most tears at your funeral. My lists two sides didn't correspond. I had baseball players, baseball writers, management, my vocation and all that stuff on one side, and on the other I had my wife and my kids. They didn't jive.
I said at this point I want to get those priorities lined up. I want my family to be No. 1 behind God on both sides of that paper.
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